Questions from the Field: Restoring Work Items When You Accidentally Delete Them
I had a customer accidentally delete some test cases in Team Foundation Server the other day and call me in a panic. Fortunately they had good backups and the story ended well but I thought it would be good to review what is needed in case you accidentally delete your work items.
It’s All About the Databases!
TFS uses databases and, therefore, the key to recovering in TFS is making sure you are backing up and are able to recover the underlying databases. Here is the guidance on how to do just that:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb552295.aspx
Not all artifacts are easy to recover. Test Plans are particularly fun to get back so my friend Angela wrote an article about how to recover in those special situations:
Have You Hugged Your DBA Today?
Being able to recover means having a good relationship with your database administrator. Make sure you are in sync on the TFS install and what pieces of the deployment are high value vs. low value projects, etc… Like in most things communication is the key to success and there is not such thing as over communicating when it comes to your TFS instance…
…Okay there IS such a thing as over communicating so don’t, for example, hire an airplane to fly over your building with your favorite table name from the TFS database.